DOES anyone have the least idea what the constitutional amendment proposed in A Strategy for Equality by the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities - "to guarantee the right of equality and prohibit discrimination" - actually means?
It has been endorsed by the Minister for Equality and Law Reform, Mr Taylor, so it must be good. But what does it mean? Yes, care for people who have been disabled by nature, accident or human design, is not merely desirable, but is a moral absolute yet this moral absolute an only be applied relatively. In this world, with finite resources and merely human patience and human generosity to call upon, moral absolutes tend to run into the brick wall of pragmatic relativity.
Moral Absolute
For example, we know that the moral absolute to prevent evil and genocide in a place such as East Timor is faced with the problems of practicability; then that moral absolute suddenly became no longer an absolute. Instead it becomes a relativity, and one we can ignore. It's not pretty, but it is life.
So, on the face of it, "to guarantee the right of equality and prohibit discrimination" is all very commendable, and certainly sounds like one of those moral absolutes which should certainly find a place in any decent constitution. But even allowing for the dissolubility of absolutes, what, pray, is equality? It is, I'm sorry to say, nothing - outside, that is, the eyes of the Almighty, the polling booth and the parking meter.
The society which does not discriminate is not a society. It is a herd. We discriminate the entire time, and from early in life. We channel children towards what they are good at. We discriminate against newspapers we do not like. We discriminate in favour of one football team against another. We discriminate against bad music and in favour of good music. We are biased against bad plumbers, are disinclined to employ poor builders, come down hard against bad television, refuse to read bad authors. Endless, endless discrimination, and that discrimination is based entirely on the abilities and disabilities of the people in question.
One doesn't have to have a disability in the accepted sense to be disabled. In all areas of life, we encounter our personal limitations. Some of these might be due to the failure of the disability of the disabled which makes them disabled. You cannot get around that truth. No doubt our response to these disabilities is inadequate, but is that inadequacy not a disability of a kind? There is no, gainsaying the truth that it is primarily the disability which disables yet gainsaying it is, what precisely people have been doing for the past decade or more.
Of course, as many areas of life should be made accessible for the disabled - which means, of course, unequal treatment, including, we read in the Commission report, mandatory work quotas. Oh heart, I hear thee sink. Further, we read in the Commission report that the Constitution should be amended to assure a right to an appropriate education for the disabled.
Constitutional Right
I see. And what does this mean? Does this mean that the disabled are to be given a constitutional right to "an appropriate education", whatever that is, and the rest of us are not? Is that equality? And who defines appropriate? You know who? Almost certainly some court which will rule in favour of a plaintiff suing in adulthood that his schooling was where he went wrong in life, and could he have a zillion pounds please?
Constitutions which meddle in the abstract realms of the "appropriate" are laying down an infinity of litigation and dispute for the unfortunate courts, and generations of fat and chuckling lawyers, invariably to be found in the category called "costs".
It is all very well saying we should not count the costs of providing for the disabled but we must, because we have to. We are finitely rich. Our economy is certainly growing, but we remain one of the poorest of 41 our muscles to propel us horizontally or upwards at sufficient speed, or the inadequacy of our, brain to cope with certain concepts. This disability might result from the poor functioning of the standard equipment which we received at birth, which is normally the case, or it might be that the equipment has been somehow or other damaged, rendering it less capable than it might have been otherwise.
How can constitutional alterations affect this truth? They can't, and we know this. How many of us, out of deep ideological egalitarianism, would go to a blind dentist? How many unsighted snipers will an army employ in order to maintain its constitutional obligations? How many deaf trombonists will be employed by the National Symphony Orchestra? How many ... oh, you get my meaning.
Unequal Treatment
In fact, what those people we normally understand as being disabled the blind or the poor sighted, the deaf or nearly deaf, the wheelchair bound and the brain damaged - actually want is unequal treatment, and rightly. If they had equal treatment, they would be living - and often enough, dying - in a hell. They need the inequality of convenient parking spaces and special ramps and State funding for wheelchairs and, special education. We should indulge this inequality as far as possible.
Yet the conventional piety since the Year of the Disabled - and enunciated perfectly by one of the respondents to the Commission - is: "It is society - not our disability - which puts obstacles in our way. It is society which denies us access. This is what we must change."
This is simply untrue. It is in European countries. The commission chairman, Mr Justice Flood, who as a lawyer is well acquainted with who pays costs (other people), in his foreword demands that all private and public transport operators should purchase accessible buses and rail carriages from January 1st.
Excellent. And will these vehicles - with their vastly expensive engineering requirements - be as used as often as the spaces for the disabled in supermarket car parks? Or did the judge say that because it seemed the right thing to say? In fact, the last thing the disabled need to hear is what might seem right to their ears. Sounding honest is far better.